In practically the blink of an eye, Maggie Irizarry lost about $1,300 to thieves. But the culprits weren't robbers who broke into her Miami home. They were hackers who connived their way onto her Lenovo laptop.

It's a safe bet that some of the websites and apps you use collect and subsequently sell your personal data. But how can you know which ones? An EPFL researcher has led the development of a program that can answer that question ...

Police in Albania say they have arrested a 25-year-old citizen who is accused of being part of a cybercrime organization that U.S. authorities allege cost consumers and businesses more than half a billion dollars.

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As the poster child for the growing ranks of computer-generated currencies, bitcoin's recent stratospheric price rises have propelled it from the chat forum-hosted depths of nerddom into the global consciousness.

Credit card

A credit card is part of a system of payments named after the small plastic card issued to users of the system. It is a card entitling its holder to buy goods and services based on the holder's promise to pay for these goods and services. The issuer of the card grants a line of credit to the consumer (or the user) from which the user can borrow money for payment to a merchant or as a cash advance to the user.

A credit card is different from a charge card, where a charge card requires the balance to be paid in full each month. In contrast, credit cards allow the consumers to 'revolve' their balance, at the cost of having interest charged. Most credit cards are issued by local banks or credit unions, and are the shape and size specified by the ISO/IEC 7810 standard as ID-1.